FCC warns carriers to stop blocking free conference calls

The Federal Communications Commission has told large telcos and carriers to stop blocking calls to conference calling services routed through Iowa. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said after a public appearance yesterday that the Commission told the big telcos that if they do not stop blocking the calls, the FCC "would end up taking action as we saw necessary," according to GigaOm.

Last month, Cingular/AT&T made waves by publicly acknowledging that they had begun to block calls to various "free" conference calling services, such as FreeConferenceCall and FuturePhone. The reasoning behind the block, according to AT&T, came from the exceptionally high "termination fees" charged by the Iowa telcos that the services are routed through. Although the calls were free to the end customer, they most certainly were not free to AT&T or other carriers who were required to pay high calling rates to those tiny, rural exchanges.

At the time of the block, AT&T's Mark Siegel told Ars that the fees were becoming so exorbitant that they could impede the carrier's ability to provide good service to its customers. "In the wireless part of AT&T's terms of service, we're very clear that wireless calling is meant for one person to talk to another. It's not meant for one person to call one of these lines, and we reserve the right to block calls to a variety of lines. We have chosen to do so here," he said.

But that isn't going to sit well with the FCC any more. Martin said after his appearance on Thursday that if the carriers did not stop blocking the calls immediately, the FCC would begin the formal process for taking legal action within several days. Apparently, all of the carriers responded to the FCC immediately, claiming that they would stop blocking the calls, although one attempted to restrict access to the Iowa telcos. "We called them back and said, no, no, you can’t artificially degrade [service] either," Martin said.

AT&T spokesperson Michael Balmoris confirmed to Ars Technica that AT&T had stopped blocking calls to the free conference calling services. "In late March we decided to provide our customers access to these phone numbers," he told Ars. "Our issue was never with our customers, but with the unscrupulous carriers and the calling services they fund through unlawful kickbacks of artificially inflated access charges."

AT&T and other carriers have filed lawsuits against the Iowa telcos for their "scam" operations. They have also filed complaints with the FCC over the access charges, which Martin says is an entirely separate issue. "If you have a dispute about the intercarrier compensation rules, you can file petitions, and come to the commission to get redress. But you can’t just stop letting consumers make those calls," he said.